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Tuesday, March 19, 2019

Though I was a huge fan of Influence, I kept pushing Cialdini's latest book Pre-Suasion further into my reading backlog. I figured the first book pretty much covered the most important stuff so well that this new one was bound to be a disappointment.

Monday, March 11, 2019

In recent decades in the West, GDP growth has slowed down, while inequality has risen. Radical Markets points out the inefficiencies with the status-quo version of capitalism we are familiar with, and recommends a wholesale change that is even more market-based than the one we have.

Tuesday, February 26, 2019

I did not want to read Mastering the Market Cycle, but it seems to be so widely read in value investing circles that I felt like I had to. Despite my low expectations, I was still disappointed by the book.

Friday, February 8, 2019

All Quiet on the Western Front is the story of World War I as seen by a teen aged German tasked with manning the front. It is a powerful story, written by a guy who served on the front lines. The Nazis banned and burned his books.

Tuesday, February 5, 2019

I can't think of a single novel on the topic of value investing...until now. A Google search for "value investing novels" provides a comprehensive list of value investing books that are decidedly *not* novels. The closest thing I can think of is an obscure book a publisher once sent me about buying low and selling high in the shipping industry (creatively named "The Shipping Man"). So in The Rebel Allocator, Jacob Taylor is breaking new ground.

Tuesday, January 22, 2019

I think we pretty much all believe that it's our intelligence that separates us from other species. In The Secret of Our Success, Joseph Henrich makes the case that we are hardly more intelligent than primates, if at all, across a number of measures. What separates us is our culture.

Tuesday, January 8, 2019

There are some books that I know I will never forget, because they have made an enormous impact on me. The Feast of the Goat is one of those books. It is a novel about a real-life cruel regime that ruled the Dominican Republic from the 1930s to the 1960s.

Friday, January 4, 2019

Thanks to the reach of the internet, platform companies are everywhere nowadays. These are companies with monopolistic characteristics thanks to their network effects (e.g. Uber, Google Search, iOS, Facebook etc.). Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy is all about discussing how to build them, what to avoid, and how to think about them.

Karsan Value Funds (KVF) is a value-oriented fund, as described here. Due to securities regulations, the fund is not open to the public at this time. Should that change in the future, there will be an announcement on this site.